Page 132 of The Dangerous Dance

I circulate.

This is the part of these operations that requires the specific skill my father called wearing the room, which is the ability to move through a social environment while appearing to move through it for social reasons rather than operational ones. I talk to people. I accept champagne I don't drink more than three sips of. I listen to conversations that are apparently about the cultural foundation and are actually, underneath the surface, about other things, and I file what I hear with the same methodical attention I apply to everything.

The third arm finds me at half past nine.

His name is Dmitri Volkov. Not a relation — the name is coincidence, or possibly not coincidence, because Viktor has always had a dry sense of operational humor. He is fifty, compact, with the specific quality of someone who has been dangerous for long enough that dangerous has become simply what he is, the way other people are tall or left-handed. He comes to stand beside me near the windows and he says something about the view, which is the opening line of someone who has been told to introduce himself.

"Nadia," he says. "Viktor has told me about you."

"He's told me very little about you," I say, which is true and which he receives with the fractional amusement of someone who expected it.

"That's appropriate," he says. "I prefer it."

He talks. I listen. I ask the questions that produce answers without appearing to produce answers, which is the technique my father showed me when I was eleven with a chess board and which works identically in ballrooms with champagne. Dmitri runs the third arm. He doesn't say this directly. He says it through the specific configuration of what he does and doesn't know, what he claims responsibility for and what he deflects, the organizational shape visible in the negative space of everything he doesn't say.

By ten o'clock I have what I came for.

Not everything. Enough.

The financing chain. The command structure under Dmitri. The three operational locations in this city that don't appear in any file we have. The contingency leadership arrangement that kicks in if Viktor is removed.

I have it in my head, which is the only safe place for it tonight.

I need to get it out of the hotel and to Liam.

I excuse myself from Dmitri at ten-fifteen.

The powder room is on the second floor, which I use as a waypoint rather than a destination. The stairwell at the far end of the second floor corridor takes me down to the hotel's service level, which is not where guests go but which is accessible if you know the layout of the building, which I do because I looked at the floor plan on Tuesday with the same attention I bring to the layout of every building I plan to enter.

The service corridor is quiet. Functional lighting. The specific atmosphere of the back of a building that exists to support the front.

I am approximately forty feet from the service exit when I see him.

He is in a suit that is not his usual suit — darker, more anonymous, with the specific quality of a garment chosen to disappear rather than to belong — and he has done something with his hair that makes him slightly less himself to a casual eye and entirely himself to me, which means the disguise is effective in general and useless in specific.

I stop.

He stops.

We look at each other in the service corridor of a midtown hotel at ten-fifteen on a Friday evening, and the look contains several things, one of which is the specific expression of a man who knows he's been caught doing the thing he said he wouldn't do and is not particularly sorry about it.

"You followed me," I say.

"I came to the gala," he says. "Separately."

"You followed me."

"I attended the same event you attended, independently, for⁠—"

"Liam."

He stops.

"You followed me," I say.

"Yes," he says.

I look at him.